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ABSTRACT
The task of this paper is to explore and compare ways of defining surveillance. In order to give meaning to
concepts that describe the realities of society, social theory is needed. Therefore social theory is employed
in this paper for discussing ways of defining surveillance. “Living in ‘surveillance societies’ may throw up
challenges of a fundamental – ontological – kind” (Lyon, 1994, p.19). Social theory is a way of clarifying
such ontological questions that concern the basic nature and reality of surveillance. A distinction between
neutral and negative concepts of surveillance is drawn. Some potential disadvantages of neutral concepts
of surveillance are outlined. This paper wants to contribute to the discussion of how to best define
surveillance and wants to show that one of the main theoretical differences and questions in surveillance
theory is if surveillance should be defined as a negative or a neutral concept.
Keywords: surveillance theory, social theory, neutral surveillance theory, negative surveillance theory,
critical surveillance studies

INTRODUCTION

News of the World surveillance of detective: what Rebekah Brooks knew. […] As editor of the News of
the World Rebekah Brooks was confronted with evidence that her paper's resources had been used on
behalf of two murder suspects to spy on the senior detective who was investigating their alleged crime.
(The Guardian, July 6, 2011).

Lidl Systematically Conducted Surveillance of Employees. Hidden cameras, pages-long protocols: Lidl
has put employees in many of its stores under surveillance. Monitored were private conversations, life
situations and the ways of work of employees. That the secret spying is illegal, seemed to disturb the
food discounter little. (Der Spiegel, March 26, 2008; translation from German).

Wiretapping and Other Eavesdropping Devices and Methods. Wiretapping and electronic
eavesdropping are virtually as old as the telephone. But the debates over wiretapping have intensified
in recent years, as the pressure to fight terrorism after the Sept. 11th attacks and rapid technological
change led to an unprecedent expansion of electronic surveillance. (New York Times, October 19,
2010).

∗
Chair in Media and Communication Studies Uppsala University, Department of Informatics and Media
Studies. Sweden. E-mail: christian.fuchs@im.uu.se
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Acknowledgement: The research presented in this paper was conducted in the project “Social
Networking Sites in the Surveillance Society”, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): project
number P 22445-G17. Project co-ordination: Dr. Christian Fuchs.
 More Employees Under Surveillance at Work. Employees are being put under increasing strain
because their bosses are using surveillance equipment to keep track of how hard they are working, a
survey has found. More than half of employees claim their managers use electronic systems to keep a
log of their work. (The Telegraph, January 9, 2008).

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). […] On March 31, 2010, a federal judge ruled that the
National Security Agency's program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama
administration's effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies
of former President George W. Bush. (New York Times, April 1, 2010).

T
hese randomly collected news clippings from newspapers give us an idea of how

important the topic of surveillance has become for the media and for our lives.

Economic and state surveillance seem to be two issues that affect the lives of all

citizens worldwide. Economic organizations are entangled into both workplace/workforce

surveillance and consumer surveillance in order to enable the capital accumulation process.

State institutions (like the police, the military, secret services, social security and unemployment

offices) are using surveillance for organizing and managing the population. All of this takes

place in the context of the extension and intensification of surveillance (Ball and Webster, 2003;

Lyon, 2003) in post-9/11 new imperialism that is afraid of terrorism and at the same time creates

this phenomenon and in the context of neoliberal corporate regimes that subjugate ever larger

spheres and parts of life to commodity logic (Harvey, 2003, p. 2005). If organizations are an

important source and space of surveillance, then it is important to understand how surveillance

can be defined.

Given the circumstance that there is much public talk about surveillance and surveillance

society, it is an important task for academia to discuss and clarify the meaning of these terms

because academic debates to a certain extent inform and influence public and political

discourses. The task of this paper is to explore compare ways of defining surveillance. In order

to give meaning to concepts that describe the realities of society, social theory is needed.

Therefore social theory is employed in this paper for discussing ways of defining surveillance.

“Living in ‘surveillance societies’ may throw up challenges of a fundamental – ontological –

kind” (Lyon, 1994, p. 19). Social philosophy is a way of clarifying such ontological questions that

concern the basic nature and reality of surveillance.

I approach the notion of surveillance by suggesting one possible typology for defining

surveillance. On the one hand I see neutral concepts of surveillance that see surveillance as an

ontological quality of all societies or all modern societies and identify besides negative aspects

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also actual or potential positive qualities of surveillance. Examples for neutral surveillance

concepts will be discussed in section two. Negative surveillance concepts consider surveillance

to be inherently connected to violence and domination. Example concepts will be discussed in

section three. The task of this paper is not to suggest that only one distinction/typology of

surveillance concepts/theories/definitions is possible, but rather to argue that a discourse about

the ways surveillance can be defined is important in order to show commonalities and

differences between various approaches. In my view, it is especially necessary to spell out besides

common characteristics of surveillance studies also the differences between various approaches

because constructive controversy is a way for advancing the state of a field and a sign that a

research field is alive and well.

The overall view that this paper advances is that surveillance should not be defined in a

neutral way, but in a negative sense. In section four, reasons for this position are given and some

arguments that question neutral surveillance concepts are provided. Finally, some conclusions

are drawn in section five.

NEUTRAL CONCEPTS OF SURVEILLANCE

Neutral concepts of surveillance make one or more of the following assumptions:

• There are positive aspects of surveillance.

• Surveillance has two faces, it is enabling and constraining

• Surveillance is a fundamental aspect of all societies.

• Surveillance is necessary for organization.

• Any kind of systematic information gathering is surveillance.

Max Horkheimer says that neutral theories “define universal concepts under which all

facts in the field in question are to be subsumed” (Horkheimer, 1937/2002, p. 224). Neutral

surveillance concepts see surveillance as ontological category, it is seen as being universally

valid and characteristic either for all societies or all modern societies.

Anthony Giddens has provided a very influential neutral concept of surveillance. By

surveillance, Giddens refers to the accumulation of information defined as symbolic materials

that can be stored by an agency of collectivity as well as to the supervision of the activities of

subordinates by their superiors within any collectivity (Giddens, 1981, p.169). Surveillance is

“the coding of information relevant to the administration of subject populations, plus their

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direct supervision by officials and administrators of all sorts” (Giddens, 1984, p. 183). With the

rise of modern, capitalist society, Giddens argues, the nation-state and surveillance have become

the fundamental mechanisms of integration. “Surveillance as the mobilising of administrative

power – through the storage and control of information – is the primary means of the

concentration of authorative resources involved in the formation of the nation-state” (Giddens,

1985, p. 181). The modern state would make use of surveillance in the sense of gathering

information about the subject population in order to allow overall organization and control.

Information gathering would include data on births, marriages, deaths, demographic and fiscal

statistics, ‘moral statistics’ (relating to suicide, divorce, delinquency and so on) etc. and would

result in the power of the state and bureaucratic organization. Computer technology would

expand surveillance in the sense of information control. Modern technology would also allow a

technical control and supervision of workers that is a much more anonymous form than face-to-

face supervision that was used in the early days of capitalism. Giddens sees surveillance as a

fundamental process of information gathering that is necessary for organization. Organizing

and surveillance are inextricably linked for Giddens and would have taken on systematic forms

in the modern nation state. He therefore also argues that all modern societies are information

societies (Giddens, 1987, p. 27; see also: Lyon, 1994, p.27). Dandeker (1990) stresses based on

Giddens that bureaucracies require surveillance.

One claim of neutral surveillance concepts is that there is a positive side of surveillance or

that there is a negative as well as a positive side of surveillance. Kevin Haggerty (2006) argues

that surveillance scholars do not want to see positive aspects of surveillance such as infectious

disease control or surveillance in parenting because they “are trained in a tradition of critique”

(Haggerty, 2006, p. 36). David Lyon says that surveillance has two faces, an enabling and a

constraining one (Lyon, 1994, p. ix). Elia Zureik (2003, p. 42) says that surveillance is “disabling

as well as enabling”.
Surveillance can serve goals of protection, administration, rule compliance, documentation, and
strategy, as well as goals involving inappropriate manipulation, restricted life opportunities, social
control, and spying. […] To varying degrees, surveillance is a property of any social system – from
two friends to a workplace to a government (Marx, 2007, p. 535).

Another claim of neutral surveillance concepts is that surveillance is a universal

phenomenon that can be found in all societies. Surveillance

is seen not only as both protective and enabling but also as deeply implicated in the structure of
totalitarian rule. Surveillance is recognised as an elementary building block of all human societies

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 since the act of socialisation would be unthinkable without the surveillance of adults. How else
could children be fabricated into cultural competent members of a society? (Norris and
Armstrong, 1999, p. 5).

In one form or another, it [surveillance] is a basic and ubiquitous social process, occurring in
settings ranging from the family to state bureaucracies – whenever one party seeks to shape its
treatment of the other on the basis of the latter’s past performance (Rule, 2007, p. 14).

Various examples for neutral definitions of surveillance can be given. The following list of

definitions is exemplary and does by no means claim to be complete.

Surveillance involves the observation, recording and categorization of information about people,
processes and institutions (Ball and Webster, 2003, p.1). Ball and Webster (2003, 7f) identify
besides three negative forms of surveillance (categorical suspicion, categorical seduction,
categorical exposure) also a positive one, namely categorical care.

Dandeker identifies three meanings of the term surveillance:

(1) the collection and storage of information, presumed to be useful, about people or objects; (2)
the supervision of the activities of people or objects through the issuing of instructions or the
physical design of the natural and built environments; and (3) the application of information-
gathering activities to the business of monitoring the behaviour of those under supervision and, in
the case of subject populations, their compliance with instructions, or with non-subject
populations, their compliance with agreements, or simply monitoring their behaviour from which,
as in the control of disease, they may have expressed a with to benefit (2006, p. 225).

Surveillance involves the collection and analysis of information about populations in order to
govern their activities (Haggerty and Ericson, 2006, p. 3).

Surveillance is “the garnering and processes of personal information to regulate, control, manage

and enable human individual and collective behaviour” (Hier and Greenberg, 2007, p. 381).

To surveil something essentially means to watch over or guard it. Guardianship is not a simple
constraint, but an art of control that makes it safe for something to move freely. You keep a close
eye on your child playing, or someone deflects a danger close to you before you even sense it
(Bogard, 2006, 98f).

Systematically harvested personal information, in other words, furnishes bases for institutions to
determine what treatment to meter out to each individual. I call such operations systems of mass
surveillance. Mass surveillance is a distinctive and consequential feature of our times. Whether
carried out by government agencies or private-sector organizations, it shapes the ways we
approach major institutions and our treatment at their hands. Surveillance in this sense does not
necessarily entail harmful intent. […] What has changed in the last hundred years is the rise of
mass, bureaucratic surveillance based on formal record-keeping. Surveillance in this form ranges
from the benign to the repressive—from the personal information systems supporting intensive
care in hospitals to those mobilized to track and curtail terrorists (Rule, 2007, p.14).

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 Surveillance is “the act of monitoring the behaviour of another either in real-time using cameras,
audio devices or key-stroke monitoring, or in chosen time by data mining records of internet
transactions” (Wall, 2007, p. 230).

NEGATIVE CONCEPTS OF SURVEILLANCE

For Max Horkheimer, the “method of negation” is “the denunciation of everything that

mutilates mankind and impedes its free development” (Horkheimer, 1947/1974, p.126) For

Herbert Marcuse, negative categories are “an indictment of the totality of the existing order”

(Marcuse, 1941, p. 258) and at the same time “already contain their own negations and

transcendence” (Marcuse, 1936/1988, p. 86). Negative concepts “contain an accusation and an

imperative” (Marcuse, 1936/1988, p. 86). For Horkheimer, the goal is “a state of affairs in which

there will be no exploitation or oppression” (Horkheimer, 1937/2002, p. 241), a “society without

injustice” (p. 221). Theories’ “goal is man’s emancipation from slavery” (p. 249) and “the

happiness of all individuals” (p. 248). This requires “the idea of self-determination for the human

race, that is the idea of a state of affairs in which man’s actions no longer flow from a

mechanism but from his own decision” (p. 229). Such a society is shaped by “reasonableness,

and striving for peace, freedom, and happiness” (p. 222) and the “the establishment of justice

among men” (p. 243).

In general concepts of surveillance, surveillance is presented as a general and universal

phenomenon of society that not only exists in contemporary or heteronomous societies, but in

all kinds of societies. It is conceptualized as a positive, self-evident, endless phenomenon of

society. A negative concept of surveillance characterizes an aspect of the negativity of power

structures, contemporary society, and heteronomous societies. It uses the notion of

surveillance for denunciating and indicting domination and dominative societies. By doing so

it wants to point towards emancipation and a dominationless society, which is conceived as

being also a society without surveillance. In a negative theory, surveillance is a negative concept

that is inherently linked to information gathering for the purposes of domination, violence, and

coercion and thereby at the same time accuses such states of society and makes political

demands for a participatory, co-operative, dominationless society that is not only a society

where co-operative modes of production and ownership replace classes and the exploitation of

surplus value, but also a society where care and solidarity – in one word: democratic socialism –

substitute surveillance. A neutral concept of surveillance is a disservice for a critical theory of

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surveillance, it makes critique more difficult and may support the ideological celebration and

normalization of surveillance.

The most influential thinker for the elaboration of negative surveillance concepts has

been Michel Foucault. Howard Rheingold argues that Foucault “was to surveillance what

Darwin was to evolutionary biology” (Rheingold, 2002, p. 188).

For Foucault, Marxism is on the one hand not so different from liberalism because they

share, he argues, a typical 19th century belief in the “fulfilment of an end to History” (Foucault,

1973, p. 261). On the other hand, Foucault refers to Marx when discussing the role of

surveillance and disciplinary power in production (Foucault 1977, 163f, 175, p. 221). Foucault

(1973) assumes based on Nietzsche that history is based on difference and radical

discontinuities. Nonetheless he does not dismiss Marxist analysis:

It is only too clear that we are living under the regime of a dictatorship of class, of a power of class
which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and
constitutional, and to that degree, there isn’t any question of democracy for us (Chomsky and
Foucault, 2006, p. 39).

Institutions such as the state, the family, the university, medicine, teaching systems,

psychiatry “are made to maintain a certain social class in power, and to exclude the instruments

of power of another class” (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006, p. 40).

For Foucault, surveillance is a form of disciplinary power. Disciplines are “general

formulas of domination” (Foucault 1977, p. 137), it includes penal mechanisms (p. 177), it

encloses humans into institutions such as schools, orphanages, training centres, the military,

towns, factories, prisons, reformatories, houses of correction, psychiatry, hospitals, asylums, etc

in order to control their behaviour and to partition and rank them (Foucault, 1977, p. 141; see

also 1994, p. 57, p.75) and to normalize, punish, hierarchize, homogenize, differentiate, and

exclude (Foucault, 1977, p. 183). Foucault argues that in order to secure domination, disciplines

make use of certain methods such as the hierarchical observation, the normalizing judgement,

and the examination (p.170). The instrument of hierarchical observation establishes the

connection disciplines-surveillance because the “exercise of discipline presupposes a mechanism

that coerces by means of observation” (p. 170). The “means of coercion make those on whom

they are applied clearly visible” (p. 171). For Foucault, disciplinary power is also characteristic

for the logic of capitalism. “Liberalism turns into a mechanism continually having to arbitrate

between the freedom and security of individuals by reference to this notion of danger”

(Foucault, 2008, p. 66). A consequence of “liberalism and the liberal art of government is the

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extension of procedures of control, constraint, and coercion” (Foucault, 2008, p. 67). “Economic

freedom, liberalism in the sense I have just been talking about, and disciplinary techniques are

completely bound up with each other” (Foucault, 2008, p. 67).

Surveillance or the panopticon secretly prepares “a knowledge of man” (Foucault, 1977, p.

171), knowledge about “whether an individual” is “behaving as he should, in accordance with

the rule or not” (Foucault, 1994, p. 59). It is “permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent” (Foucault,

1977, p. 214). Surveillance is based on “a principle of compulsory visibility” that is exercised

through the invisibility of disciplinary power (p. 187), it “must see without being seen” (p. 171),

is “capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible” (p. 214), it is a

“system of permanent registration” (p. 196) in which “all events are recorded” (p. 197), a

“machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad” (p. 202). “One is totally seen, without ever

seeing” (p. 202). “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject

in communication” (p. 200). “We live in a society where panopticism reigns” (Foucault 1994, p.

58). For Foucault, surveillance is inherently coercive and dominative – negativity is

surveillance’s pure immanence.

The idea of the panopticon is a modern idea in one sense, but we can also say that it is completely
archaic, since the panoptic mechanism basically involves putting someone in the center – an eye, a
gaze, a principle of surveillance – who will be able to make its sovereignty function over all the
individuals [placed] within this machine of power. To that extent we can say that the panopticon is
the oldest dream of the oldest sovereign: None of my subjects can escape and none of their actions
is unknown to me. The central point of the panopticon still functions, as it were, as a perfect
sovereign (Foucault, 2007, p. 93).

Foucault argues that drawing up tables was one of the important problems of disciplinary

power in the 18th century (Foucault, 1977, p. 148). The table is a “procedure of knowledge” (p.

148), surveillance and disciplinary power produce reality, knowledge about individuals (p. 194).

Surveillance always includes “a network of writing” and “a whole mass of documents” (p. 189).

In contemporary society, tables take on the form of digital databases that store huge amounts of

data that can be automatically collected, assessed, manipulated, and remixed, are available in

real time, are distributed at high speed all over the world, are easy and cheap to collect and

distribute, and can be duplicated without destruction of the original data. The computer

database enables an extension and intensification of surveillance based on tables. The computer

and the computer network used for surveillance constitute one of the “innovations of

disciplinary writing” (p. 190) of the contemporary age. The connection power/knowledge that

Foucault stresses as constitutive for surveillance takes on the form of power/digital data in the

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information age.

A number of authors argue that Foucault’s notion of the panopticon can be used for

characterizing and criticizing contemporary society. Gordon (1987) speaks of the electronic

panopticon. Zuboff (1988) says that computers advance workplace panopticism. Poster (1990)

has coined the notion of the superpanopticon: “Today’s ‘circuits of communication’ and the

databases they generate constitute a Superpanopticon, a system of surveillance without walls,

windows, towers or guards” (Poster, 1990, p. 93). Gandy (1993) defines the panoptic sort as “a

difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine

measurements. It is a discriminatory technology that allocates options and opportunities on the

basis of those measures and the administrative models that they inform” (Gandy, 1993, p. 15). It

is a system of power and disciplinary surveillance that identifies, classifies, and assesses (Gandy,

1993, p. 15). James Boyle (1997) argues that the works of Foucault allow an alternative to the

assumption of Internet libertarians that cyberspace cannot be controlled in order to provide

“suggestive insights into the ways in which power can be exercised on the Internet” (Boyle, 1997,

p. 184). Robins and Webster (1999) argue that in what they term cybernetic society “the

computer has achieved […] the extension and intensification of panoptic control” (Robins and

Webster, 1999, p. 180, see also pp. 118-122). They focus on consumer surveillance and social

Taylorism. Webster (2002, p. 222) argues that computers result in a panopticon without physical

walls. Elmer (2003) speaks of diagrammatic panoptic surveillance. Mathiesen (2004) argues that

the panopticon, where the few see the many, is accompanied in contemporary society by the

synopticon that is based on the mass media and “in which the few see and survey the many”

(Mathiesen, 2004, p. 98) so that the media recipients are silenced.

These approaches show that Foucault has a certain importance in contemporary

surveillance studies. However, a considerable number of scholars question the suitability of

Foucault’s theory for analyzing contemporary surveillance. Lyon (1994, 26, p. 67) argues that

Foucault’s notion of the panopticon does not give attention to two central features of

contemporary surveillance: information technologies and consumerism. This is certainly true,

but Foucault’s focus was on more historical, older forms of surveillance. His method of

genealogy traces surveillance with examples back in history in order to identify more general

principles of surveillance for modernity. He stresses that surveillance is an open and historical

phenomenon; his analysis can therefore be applied to contemporary contexts. Foucault argues

that disciplinary mechanisms have the capability of swarming (Foucault 1977, p. 211), they can

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spread out through society. This principle allows giving an explanation for the extension of

surveillance into the realms of IT and consumption in contemporary society.

Some scholars argue that Foucault’s notion of surveillance is outdated because

surveillance would today no longer be centralized, but operate in a decentralized and networked

form so that there is not a central surveilling power, but many disperse and heterogeneous

agents of surveillance.
Certainly, surveillance today is more decentralized, less subject to spatial and temporal constraints
(location, tie of day, etc.), and less organized than ever before by the dualisms of observer and
observed, subject and object, individual and mass. The system of control is deterritorializing
(Bogard, 2006, p. 102).

Lace (2005, p. 210) argues that “allusions to Big Brother scrutiny are becoming dated –

instead, we now are moving towards a society of ‘little brothers’” (see also Castells, 2004, p. 342;

Solove, 2004, p. 32) that she terms a democratized surveillance society.

Haggerty and Ericson (2000/2007) define surveillance based on Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari as assemblage. The surveillant assemblage means “a rhizomatic levelling of the

hierarchy of surveillance, such that groups which were previously exempt from routine

surveillance are now increasingly being monitored” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000/2007, p. 104).

They argue that one should conceive contemporary surveillance with analytical tools that are

different from Foucault and Orwell. Haggerty (2006) calls for demolishing Foucault’s notion of

the panopticon. Haggerty and Ericson (2000/2007) argue that contemporary surveillance is

heterogeneous, involves humans and non-humans, state and extra-state institutions, “allows for

the scrutiny of the powerful by both institutions and the general population” (Haggerty and

Ericson 2000/2007, p. 112). They interpret Mathiesen as saying that synopticism means

“‘bottom-up’ forms of observation” (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000/2007, p. 113). Hier (2003/2007,

p. 118) argues that the surveillant assemblage brings about “a partial democratization of

surveillance hierarchies”.

In my view, Thomas Mathiesen’s intention when formulating the concept of the

synopticon was not, as unfortunately implied by Haggerty’s and Ericson’s usage of the term, to

argue that surveillance has become a form of democracy. He did not suggest that the synopticon

brings about democratic surveillance, but that the panopticon and the synopticon are

interlinked, “feed on each other” (Mathiesen, 1997, p. 231) and are structures of domination. He

points out that the synopticon of the mass media “first of all directs and controls or disciplines

our consciousness” (Mathiesen, 1997, p. 230) and refers in this context to the critical theorists

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Enzensberger, Adorno, and Horkheimer and their culture industry theory. Mathiesen says that

in the synopticon there is “an extensive system enabling the many to see and contemplate the

few”, whereas in the panopticon the few “see and supervise the many” (Mathiesen, 1997, p. 219).

There is a difference between seeing and supervising, in Mathiesen’s concept the many do not

have the power to supervise the few, but the few have the power to supervise the many. The

synopticon is not, as argued by scholars such as Haggerty and Ericson, a democratic system, he

does not see an optimistic alternative to Foucault in existence, but rather “things are much

worse than Foucault imagined” (Mathiesen, 1997, p. 231).

Foucault assumes that the historical forms that he analyzed have “a central point”

(Foucault, 1977, p. 173), a “central tower” (p. 207) that illuminates everything and is “a locus of

convergence for everything that must be known” (p. 173), “a perfect eye” (p. 173), “a centre

towards which all gazes would be turned” (p. 173), from which all order come and where all

activities are recorded (p. 174). Due to the availability of digital networks, surveillance operates

with the help of global decentralized networks and can in principle be exerted by many actors

who have access to such networks. There is not one single geographical point of access to

gathered data, it can be accesses from everywhere. Also there is not one central electronic

database for surveillance, but many dispersed ones that can be used in combination by powerful

actors in order to conduct interlinked data searches. These are important technological changes,

but it is a postmodernist misbelief that surveillance becomes symmetric and can be exercised by

everyone. Gathering a huge amount of data about many people is complex, time- and resource-

intensive, actors who control money and bureaucratic power can therefore easier accomplish it,

i.e. corporations and the state are privileged actors in conducting surveillance because they

control economic and political power. To obscure this unequal power geography of surveillance

trivializes the coercive realities of economic and political surveillance. If we understand Foucault

as saying that powerful actors control disciplinary power, then the notion of centralized and

hierarchical surveillance is still valid. It is easier to exert counter-power, but there is an unequal

distribution of power. Surveillance as social relation is embedded into asymmetric social

relationships that have a tendency towards centralizing power and organizing it into a hierarchy.

The technologies of surveillance have evolved from more geographically centralized and

temporally discontinuous methods towards geographically decentralized and temporally

continuous methods. Foucault’s analysis does not exclude that the methods of surveillance can

become more decentralized and dispersed because he says that surveillance is “a network of

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relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally”

(Foucault, 1977, p. 176).

The analysis that corporations and states are the central surveillance actors can for

example be found in the works of Toshimaru Ogura and Oscar Gandy.

Toshimaru Ogura (2006, p. 272) argues that “the common characteristics of surveillance

are the management of population based on capitalism and the nation state”. He distinguishes

stages in the development of modern surveillance: 1) workplace surveillance; 2) population

management in the nation state; 3) mass media and advertising as tools for the control and

manipulation of the human mind; 4) computerized surveillance that allows new forms of

marketing based on the social sorting of consumers; 5) surveillance based on networked ICTs.
The intention of surveillance in modern capitalist society is to control and mobilze each individual
as labour power and to integrate various subject identities into a national identity. […]
Modern/postmodern surveillance-oriented society is routed in a deep scepticism of humans. In
other words, modern/postmodern society inherently has a kind of machine fetishism at the core of
its worldview. It assumes, therefore, that being human lies at the root of uncertainty, that machines
are without error, and that following instructions faithfully is an ideal model of humans (Ogura,
2006, p. 277).

For Oscar Gandy, corporations and the state are the central actors that conduct

surveillance. “The panoptic sort is a technology that has been designed and is being continually

revised to serve the interests of decision makers within the government and the corporate

bureaucracies” (Gandy, 1993, p. 95). Gandy argues that the panoptic sort is an antidemocratic

system of control of human existence (Gandy, 1993, p. 227), threatens the autonomy of the

individual because if personal information becomes available to those who are able to make

decisions about a person’s options (p. 180), that some parts of a person are used by another

without permission (p. 186) for example by corporations.

Many contemporary definitions of surveillance lack a distinction between the social

relations and the technological forces of surveillance. It is not clear if surveillance is considered

as a technology or a social relation. I therefore argue that it is important to distinguish and see

the difference between technologies of surveillance (what could be termed the productive forces

of surveillance, which also points towards the historical development of the productivity of

surveillance technologies) and social/societal structures of surveillance (the relations of

production of surveillance).

Surveillance is today panoptic not because surveillance technologies are centralized and

hierarchic (they are more dispersed and decentralized, for example the Internet), but because

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states and corporations are dominant actors that accumulate power that they can use for

disciplinary surveillance (disciplining economic and political behaviour).

For Foucault, surveillance is an instrument of disciplinary power. He has stressed that

“the term ‘power’ designates relationships” (Foucault, 1994, p. 337), “it brings into play relations

between individuals” (p. 337). Surveillance is a social relationship between humans that involves

disciplinary power and makes use of instruments for producing knowledge about these humans

in order to coerce and dominate the. To reduce surveillance to the level of surveillance

technologies not only robs it of its social dimension, it is a form of techno-deterministic

reductionism and fetishism that reifies surveillance and thereby destroys the concept’s critical

potential.
Big Brother envisions a centralized authoritarian power that aims for absolute control, but the
digital dossiers constructed by businesses aren’t controlled by a central power, and their goal is not
to oppress us but to get us to buy new products and services (Solove, 2004, p. 7).

Although businesses each collect data for their own marketing and accumulation

purposes, a certain share of these data are traded and decentralized collection results in a

centralized power of capital as totality over citizens. Marketing and advertising are also forms of

oppression because they aim at capital accumulation that benefits only a few people in financial

terms. Solove (2004) prefers the notion of intransparent bureaucratic surveillance from Kafka’s

“The Trial” to Orwell’s notion of Big Brother or the idea of the panopticon for describing

contemporary surveillance. Intransparency is an aspect of contemporary Internet surveillance

because so much data about us is stored that we do not even know about. But this

intransparency helps two powerful collective actors, capital and the state, to control our lives,

which means that the little sisters converge in two panoptic Big Brothers.

Deleuze (1995) has stressed that contemporary domination operates based on self-

control, identification, inclusion, networks, modulations, flexibility. Deleuze compares the post-

fordist individual to a serpent and the fordist individual to a mole. Individuals in flexible

capitalism must be agile like a snake, flexible, innovative, motivated, dynamic, modern, and

young in order to survive. The dull compulsion of economic relations forces individuals to

engage full-scale in their own economic exploitation, to positively respond to the participatory

management strategies that tell them that they should be creative, bring up new ideas,

permanently innovate without gaining ownership rights (see Fuchs, 2008, pp. 148-153). The

self-control that Deleuze speaks about is an ideology in the sense of knowledge that fails to

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identify the essence of real phenomena. For Georg Lukács, ideology “by-passes the essence of

the evolution of society and fails to pinpoint it and express it adequately” (Lukács, 1971, p. 50).

Slavoj Žižek (1994, p. 305) argues that “‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence

implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence”. Self-controlling individuals

identify with their own exploitation and domination, they consent to it and take active part in its

reproduction. They do not or cannot recognize the true nature of the relations they are part of.

Self-control is not a process of surveillance because it is not based on external data gathering for

repressive ends. No external supervision for disciplinary ends is needed in self-control, the

individuals discipline themselves. I agree that Deleuze is important for conceptualizing

contemporary information processes (see especially Murakami Wood, 2007). In my categorical

universe, Deleuze’s notion of self-control is useful for describing the partial obliteration of

surveillance by self-control and ideology. Surveillance does not vanish, but is in many cases

implemented as a security mechanism so that surveillance and self-control are used as two

mechanisms (one of direct violence and one of ideological violence) for reproducing and

securing domination. Managers are called for by strategists to no longer understand themselves

as watchpersons, but as partners of the workforce. Just in case that participatory management

does not work for securing and increasing productivity and efficiency, surveillance systems are

in operation in order to guarantee a double disciplinary mechanism that drives profitability.

For John Fiske, surveillance is always a totalitarian power:

Surveillance is the power to know without being known, to see without being seen. […] all
surveillance is totalitarian, for it allows its victims no say in the way it operates, and we must not
allow the general benignity of its uses to mask the fact (Fiske, 1996, p. 46, p. 241).

To sum up, we can say that negative approaches tend to define surveillance as the

collection of data on individuals or groups that are used so that control and discipline of

behaviour can be exercised by the threat of being targeted by violence. The negative notion of

surveillance can for example be found in the works by Foucault, in neo-foucauldian surveillance

studies, in the approaches of representatives of the critical political economy of surveillance

(Gandy, Ogura), and in cultural studies of surveillance (Fiske). Surveillance is an expression of

instrumental reason and competition because it is based on the idea that others are watched and

data on their behaviour, ideas, look, etc. are gathered so that they can be controlled and

disciplined and choose certain actions and avoid others that are considered as undesirable.

Competitive interests and behaviours are involved, the controlling group, class or individuals try

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to force the surveilled to avoid certain actions by conveying to the latter that information on

them is available that could be used for actions that could have negative influences on their lives.

Surveillance operates with threats and fear; it is a form of psychological and structural violence

that can turn into physical violence.

Following Ogura’s (2006) and Gandy’s (1993) argument that a common characteristic of

surveillance is the management of population based on capitalism and/or the nation state, we

can distinguish between economic and political surveillance as the two major forms of

surveillance. Surveillance by nation states and corporations aims at controlling the behaviour of

individuals and groups, i.e. they should be forced to behave or not behave in certain ways

because they know that their appearance, movements, location, or ideas are or could be watched

by surveillance systems. In the case of political electronic surveillance, individuals are threatened

by the potential exercise of organized violence (of the law) if they behave in certain ways that are

undesired, but watched by political actors (such as secret services or the police). In the case of

economic electronic surveillance, individuals are threatened by the violence of the market that

wants to force them to buy or produce certain commodities and help reproduce capitalist

relations by gathering and using information on their economic behaviour with the help of

electronic systems. In such forms of surveillance violence and heteronomy are the ultimo ratio.

One can certainly criticize that Foucault did not want to provide thoughts about

alternatives to surveillance and disciplinary society because he was cautious and argued that

such claims might result in new disciplines. Foucault made clear that the “struggle against

disciplines, or rather against disciplinary power” is a “search for a nondisciplinary power”

(Foucault, 2004, p. 39). Foucault does not go beyond this specification, whereas in the

Foucault/Chomsky debate Chomsky argued that “solidarity and sympathy” are “fundamental

human needs” (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006, p. 55) and that a future society can be built on

these qualities and be organized as a “system of decentralized power and free association” (p.

63). The counter-pole to surveillance is solidarity and co-operation, a co-operative society built

on solidarity, a socialist society, is a dominationless, non-surveillance society (Fuchs, 2008).

David Lyon has constructed a theory of surveillance (Lyon, 1994, p. 192). In my view,

Lyon’s surveillance studies approach is ambivalent in character. On the one hand, he says that

surveillance is janus-faced, which speaks for a neutral notion of surveillance. “I regard some

form of surveillance as an inherent – and not necessarily evil – feature on all human societies”

(Lyon, 1994, p. 19). On the other hand, David Lyon’s approach is normative and clairaudient for

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the voices and interests of political activists, which is more characteristic for negative concepts

of surveillance. David Lyon defines surveillance as the “contexts within which personal data is

collected” (Lyon, 1994, ix). Lyon refined his definition so that surveillance was later defined as

“any collection and processing of personal data, whether identifiable or not, for the purposes of

influencing or managing those whose data have been garnered” (Lyon, 2001, p. 2) and as

“routine ways in which focused attention is paid to personal data by organizations that want to

influence, manage, or control certain persons or population groups” (Lyon, 2003, p. 5). The

terms influence, management, and control are ambiguous. Depending on how exactly they are

understood/defined, either as general concepts or as more negative concepts, one will either get

a neutral or a negative definition of surveillance.

A CRITIQUE OF NEUTRAL SURVEILLANCE CONCEPTS

In my opinion, there are four reasons that speak against defining surveillance in a neutral way.

Etymology

Surveillance stems etymologically from the French surveiller, to oversee, watch over. Lyon

(2001, p. 3) says that literally surveillance as “watching over” implies both involves care and

control. Watching over implies that there is a social hierarchy between persons, in which one

person exerts power over the other. Watching, monitoring, seeing over someone is

etymologically connected to nouns such as watcher, watchmen, overseer, and officer. If the word

surveillance implies power hierarchies, then it is best to assume that surveillance always has to

do with domination, violence, and (potential or actual) coercion. Foucault there fore sees

surveillance as a technique of coercion (Foucault, 1977, p. 222), it is “power exercised over him

[an individual] through supervision” (Foucault, 1994, p. 84). John Gilliom (2001) studied the

attitudes of women who were on welfare in Ohio, whose personal activities are intensively

documented and assessed by computerized systems. Gilliom stresses that this system works as

“overseer of the poor”. He concludes that these women saw surveillance as inherently negative.

Surveillance would be “watching from above”, an “expression and instrument of power” used

“to control human behavior” (Gilliom, 2001, p. 3). “The politics of surveillance necessarily

include the dynamics of power and domination” (Gilliom 2001, p. 2). Gilliam also notes the

connectedness of the term surveillance to the categories overseer and supervisor (Gilliom, 2001,

p. 3).

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 Theoretical conflationism

Neutral concepts of surveillance analyze phenomena as for example taking care of a baby

or the electrocardiogram of a myocardial infarction patient on the same analytical level as for

example preemptive state-surveillance of personal data of citizens for fighting terrorism or

economic surveillance of private data and online behaviour by Internet companies such as

Facebook, Google, etc for accumulating capital by targeted advertising. If surveillance is seen as

an all-encompassing concept, it becomes difficult to see the differences between phenomena of

violence and care. The danger of surveillance conflationism is that violence and care can no

longer be analytically separated because they are always both at the same time contained within

the very concept of surveillance. If surveillance is used as a neutral term, then the distinction

between non-coercive information gathering and coercive surveillance processes becomes

blurred, both phenomena are amassed in an undifferentiated unity that makes it hard to

distinguish or categorically fix the degree of coercive severity of certain forms of surveillance.

The double definitional strategy paves the categorical way for trivializing coercive forms of

surveillance. It becomes more difficult to elaborate, apply, and use normative, critical concepts

of surveillance. There is a danger that surveillance conflationism results in merely analytical

concepts of surveillance that lack normative and political potential.

In everyday language use, citizens tend to use the concept of surveillance in a negative

way and to connection the Orwellian dystopia of totalitarianism with this notion. In academia,

the notion of surveillance is besides in the social sciences especially employed in medicine.

Surveillance data and surveillance systems in medicine are connected to the monitoring of

diseases and health statuses. In the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), the most frequently

cited paper that contains the word surveillance in its title, is a medical work titled “Annual

report to the nation on the status of cancer, 1975-2000, featuring the uses of surveillance data for

cancer prevention and control” (SSCI search, April 30, 2010). This shows that there is a

difference between the everyday usage and the predominant academic usage of the term

surveillance. The first tends to be more political and normative, the latter more analytical. My

argument is that the social science usage of the term surveillance should not be guided by the

understandings given to the term in medicine, the natural sciences, or engineering because the

specific characteristic of the social sciences is that it has a strong normative and critical tradition

that should in my opinion not be dismissed. The question is if surveillance should be

considered as a political concept or a general concept.

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 Difference between information gathering and surveillance

If surveillance is any form of systematic information gathering, then surveillance studies

is the same as information society studies and the surveillance society is a term synonymous for

the category of the information society. Given these assumptions, there are no grounds for

claiming that surveillance studies is a distinct discipline or transdiscipline. For me, information

and information society are the more general terms. I consider surveillance as one specific kind

of information process and a surveillance society as one specific kind of information society.

The notion of the surveillance society characterizes for me certain negative aspects of

heteronomous information societies. It is opposed to the notion of a participatory, co-operative,

sustainable information society (Fuchs, 2008, 2010; Fuchs, Boersma, Albrechtslund and Sanvoal;

Fuchs and Obrist, 2010). Depending on societal contexts and political regulation, information

has different effects. I suggest that the opposing term of surveillance is solidarity, which allows

to categorically separate negative and positive aspects and effects of information processes.

I do not intend to say that information technologies do not have positive potentials and I

do agree with David Lyon and others that Foucault’s account is too dystopian and lacks positive

visions and strategies for the transformation of society. The relationship of information

technology and society is complex and dialectical and therefore creates multiple positive and

negative potentials that frequently contradict each other (Fuchs, 2008). But under

heteronomous societal conditions we cannot assume that the pros and cons of information

technology are equally distributed, the negative ones are automatically present, the positive ones

remain much more latent, precarious, and have to be realized in struggles. My suggestion is

therefore that the term surveillance should be employed for describing the negative side of

information gathering, processing, and use that is inextricably bound up with coercion,

domination, and (direct or indirect; physical, symbolic, structural, or ideological) violence.

Normalization of surveillance

If everything is surveillance, it becomes difficult to criticize repressive forms of

surveillance politically because surveillance is then a term that is used in everyday language for

all sorts of harmless information processes that do not inflict damage on humans. The post 9/11

world has seen an intensification and extension of repressive surveillance. Therefore I consider

it important to have categories available that allow scholars, activists, and citizens to criticize

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these developments. If surveillance is a normalized concept of everyday language use that

characterizes all forms of information gathering, storage, and processing and not only a critical

concept, then this normative task becomes more difficult. If everything is surveillance, then

there is no outside of surveillance left, no transcendental humanistic sphere, idea, or subject that

allows to express discontent coercive information gathering and the connected human rights

violations. Repressive surveillance has slowly, but steadily, crept into our lives and it therefore

becomes easier that policy makers and other powerful actors present its implementation as

necessary and inevitable. The normalization of the concept of surveillance may ideologically

support such developments. It is therefore in my opinion a better strategy to make surveillance a

strange concept that is connected to feelings of alienation and domination. For doing so, it is

necessary to alienate the notion of surveillance from its normalized neutral usage.

CONCLUSION

The task of this paper was to argue that it is important to deal with the theoretical question of

how surveillance can be defined. My view is that it will be impossible to find one universal,

generally accepted definition of surveillance and that it is rather importance to stress different

approaches of how surveillance can be defined, to work out the commonalities and differences

of these concepts, and to foster constructive dialogue about these questions. A homogenous

state of the art of defining surveillance is nowhere in sight and maybe is not even desirable.

Constructive controversy about theoretical foundations is in my opinion not a characteristic of

the weakness or of a field, but an indication that it is developing and in a good state. It is not my

goal to establish one specific definition of surveillance, although I of course have my own view

of what is surveillance and what is not surveillance, which I try to ground by finding and

communicating arguments. Theorizing surveillance has to take into account the boundary

between surveillance and information and it has to reflect the desirability or undesirability of

normative and critical meanings of the term. No matter how one defines surveillance, each

surveillance concept positions itself towards theoretical questions such as the relation of

abstractness and concreteness, generality and specificity, normative philosophy and analytical

theorizing, etc.

My personal view is that information is a more general concept than surveillance and that

surveillance is a specific kind of information gathering, storage, processing, assessment, and use

that involves potential or actual harm, coercion, violence, asymmetric power relations, control,

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manipulation, domination, disciplinary power. It is instrumental and a means for trying to

derive and accumulate benefits for certain groups or individuals at the expense of other groups

or individuals. Surveillance is based on a logic of competition. It tries to bring about or prevent

certain behaviours of groups or individuals by gathering, storing, processing, diffusing,

assessing, and using data about humans so that potential or actual physical, ideological, or

structural violence can be directed against humans in order to influence their behaviour. This

influence is brought about by coercive means and brings benefits to certain groups at the

expense of others. Surveillance is in my view therefore never co-operative and solidary – it never

benefits all. Nonetheless, there are certainly information processes that aim at benefiting all

humans. I term such information processes monitoring, it involves information processing that

aims at care, benefits, solidarity, aid, and co-operation, benefits all, and is opposed to

surveillance.

Here are some examples of what I consider to be forms of surveillance:

* teachers watching private activities of pupils via webcams at Harriton High School, Pennsylvania;
* the scanning of the fingerprints of visitors entering the United States;
* the use of speed cameras for identifying speeders (involves state power);
* electronic monitoring bracelets for prisoners in an open prison system;
* the scanning of Internet and phone data by secret services with the help of the Echelon system
and the Carnivore software;
* the usage of full body scanners at airports;
* biometrical passports containing digital fingerprints;
* the use of the DoubleClick advertising system by Internet corporations for collecting data about
users’ online browsing behaviour and providing them with targeted advertising;
* CCTV cameras in public means of transportation for the prevention of terrorism;
* the assessment of customer shopping behaviour with the help of loyalty cards;
* the data collection in marketing research;
* the publication of sexual paparazzi photos of celebrities in a tabloid;
* the assessment of personal images and videos of applicants on Facebook by employers prior to a
job interview;
* the collection of data about potential or actual terrorists in the TIDE database (Terrorist
Identities Datamart Environment) by the US National Counterterrorism Center;
* Passenger Name Record (PNR) data transfer from Europe to the United States in aviation;
* Telekomgate: spying on employees, trade unionists, journalists, and members of the board of
directors by the German Telekom;
* the video filming of employees in Lidl supermarkets and assessment of the data by managers in
Germany;
* watching the watchers: corporate watch systems, filming of the police beating of Rodney King
(LA 1992), YouTube video of the police killing of Neda Soltan (Iran, 2009).

The point about these examples is that they all involve asymmetrical power relations,

some form of violence, and that systematic information processing inflicts some form of harm.

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We live in heteronomous societies, therefore surveillance processes can be encountered very

frequently. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to argue that domination is a universal

characteristic of all societies and all social systems. Just think of the situations in our lives that

involve altruism, love, friendship, and mutual care. These are examples that show that non-

dominative spheres are possible and actual. My argument is that it is possible to think about

alternative modes of society, where co-operation, solidarity, and care are the guiding principles

(Fuchs, 2008). If information processes are central in such a society, then I would not want to

term it surveillance society, but solidary information society or participatory, co-operative,

sustainable information society (Fuchs, 2008, 2010).

Here are some examples of monitoring that are not forms of surveillance:
*consensual online video sex chat of adults;
* parents observing their sleeping sick baby with a camera or babyphone in order to see if it needs
their help;
* the permanent electrocardiogram of a cardiac infarction patient;
* the seismographic early detection of earthquakes;
* the employment of the DART system (Deep-ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunamis) in
the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Caribbean Sea for detecting tsunamis;
* the usage of a GPS-based car navigation system for driving to an unknown destination;
* the usage of a fire detector and alarm system and a fire sprinkling system in a public school;
* drinking water quality measurement systems;
* the usage of smog and air pollution warning systems;
* the activities of radioactivity measuring stations for detecting nuclear power plant disasters;
* systems for detecting and measuring temperature, humidity, and smoke in forest areas that are
prone to wildfires;
* measurement of meteorological data for weather forecasts.

The point about these examples is that there are systematic information processes in our

societies that do not involve systematic violence, competition, and domination, but aim at

benefits for all. One can certainly discuss if these are particularly good examples and if the

boundaries between the first and the second list can be clearly drawn, but the central point I

want to make is that there are political choices between advancing and regulating systematic

information processing that has repressive or solidary effects and that this difference counts

normatively. Certainly, forms of monitoring can easily turn into forms of surveillance, and

surveillance technologies might be refined in ways that serve solidary purposes. The more

crucial point that I want to make is that normative theories, critical thinking, and critical

political practices matter in our society and that they need a clear understanding of concepts. I

question postmodern and constructivist approaches that want to tell us that it has become

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completely impossible to distinguish what is desirable and undesirable or that all normative

ideas and political projects are inherently prone to producing new forms of violence and

domination. I am convinced that a non-violent, dominationless society is possible and that it is

especially in times of global crisis important to have clearly defined concepts at hand that help

criticizing violence and domination and points towards a different world. I therefore see a need

for a realist, critical concept of surveillance.

My argument is that there is a difference between the productive forces of surveillance

and the social relations/structures of surveillance. Most information technologies can be

designed in different ways and used in different societal contexts. Therefore technologies as such

in most cases do not determine the larger effects in society. What is and what is not surveillance

can therefore in my opinion not be determined at the level of technologies, but only at the level

of social structures, by observing if the contexts, outcomes and effects of certain surveillance

technologies benefit all, or cause harms and enforce and deepen domination, exploitation, and

alienation. I therefore argue for a critical theory of surveillance. Such a theory is also a realist

and non-constructivist theory because it argues that humans are able to observe and make

grounded and reasonable judgements about the positive and negative effects of technologies.

I identified a number of issues that in my opinion should be addressed by what I term

neutral surveillance approaches:

- A neutral notion of surveillance puts negative and positive aspects of surveillance on one
categorical level and therefore may trivialize repressive information gathering and usage.
- A neutral surveillance concept does not allow distinguishing between information gathering and
surveillance, therefore no distinction between a surveillance society and an information society and
no distinction between surveillance studies and information society studies can be drawn.
- A dialectic should not be assumed at the categorical level of surveillance, but at a meta-level that
allows to distinguish between surveillance and solidarity as positive respectively negative side of
systematic information gathering.
- Etymologically the term surveillance implies a relationship of asymmetrical power, domination,
hierarchy, and violence.

Neutral surveillance approaches see surveillance as having two faces, a positive and a

negative one, argue that surveillance exists in all societies, and that it involves any kind of

information gathering in organizations. Neutral surveillance approaches have become the new

orthodoxy of Surveillance Studies that hardly anybody has questioned. Surveillance Studies

wants to be a broad interdisciplinary field that institutionalizes itself, therefore the suggestion to

conceptualize surveillance as purely negative concept does not fit into this task. Negative

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surveillance approaches point out that surveillance is a repressive process of information

gathering aiming at the installation or reproduction of domination.

A critical theory of surveillance is in need of a negative concept of surveillance. Otherwise

it ends up limiting its critical potentials and becoming part of administration.

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Article received on 20th August 2011 and approved on 24th September 2011.

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